We have just found out that prolific writer, producer, director, documentary maker and pseudoscientific genius Alan Landsburg died on August 13th. We are desolate.
Landsburg worked for Time Life and National Geographic; he
worked with Jacques Cousteau; he worked with Leonard Nimoy. He wrote a dozen
books and gave us over 2,000 hours of edutainment, including around fifty
television films including ‘Tarantula: Deadly Cargo’, ‘The Savage Bees’, ‘Burned
At The Stake’ and ‘Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women’.
He was a hero to us because he KNEW that the Earth is an
even weirder place than it already appears: place where the ancient past and
the distant future are inextricably linked, where ghosts are real, where mysterious
animals roam the uncharted wildernesses of the world, where aliens pop by
whenever they feel like it, where the human mind can kill or cure or set something
on fire, where nature is always one step away from utterly engulfing
civilisation - and because Landsburg KNEW
this, his greatest work starts with the premise that the weirdest answer is
always right then works backwards, pouncing on every scrap of evidence as justification
for his faith.
His most famous show, ‘In Search Of…’ might as well have been
called ‘Ipso fucking Facto’, so eager is it to present theory as reality - and
reality as something that is infinitely complex and utterly bizarre. As you
might expect, that had an enormous influence on our world view.
Rest in peace, dear Alan. You’ll have all the answers by now,
we hope you’re not disappointed.
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